Dell’s not going to resell anymore EMC products like its Clariion SAN arrays, Celerra NAS servers, Data Domain deduplication appliances and VNX NAS/SAN combo arrays. Instead it will sell its own widgetry in competition with EMC.

The Dell-EMC relationship started coming apart in 2007 when Dell bought EqualLogic. Dell’s foiled attempt to buy 3PAR last year strained it some more and it’s buying Compellent Technologies a few months later for its Clariion-competitive mid-range storage really tore it. There’s been expectations of a divorce ever since.

The end has now come two years before their latest contract was supposed to expire.

In the past EMC product (mostly Clariion) represented 50% of Dell’s storage revenue and Dell contributed 8%-9% of EMC annual revenues.

Dell has spent upwards of $2 billion the last three-four years on iSCSI SAN merchant EqualLogic, Fibre Channel storage company Compellent, scale-out NAS house Exanet and data compression vendor Ocarina. It’s also got partnerships with Symantec, CommVault and Caringo. It’s now supposed to get close to 80% of its storage revenues from its own IP and most of its profits.

Dell means to support EMC products past 2013 through EMC’s end-of-life dates. Most of the Clariion and Celerra lines were supposed to be discontinued anyway at the end of the year and replaced by VNX and VNXe.

The Acadia joint venture oddly appended to the original VCE Coalition is gone, its integration functions transferred to VCE, the company. Acadia’s hallmark professional services seem to have disappeared entirely, gone to partners.

The restructuring is supposed to simplify the way the coalition does business but obviously the old structure didn’t work. The streamlined entity, still a work in progress, is supposed to correct its failing, shushing reseller complaints about Acadian competition and getting a fire lit under sales.

According to VCE chairman and CEO Michael Capellas, “As one entity under a single management structure, VCE can scale more rapidly to meet market demand while ensuring that our efforts are tightly aligned with the needs of our customers and partners.”

VCE reckons its total incremental market opportunity exceeds $100 billion and that its supply chain capacity can support a billion dollars in bookings. With a hundred customers, it’s believed to be operating under that potential.

Once the CEO of Compaq before he sold it to HP, Capellas was originally brought in as CEO of Acadia Enterprises LLC and chairman of the VCE Coalition.

Presumably the old ownership arrangements maintain. The Acadia joint venture was between Cisco and EMC with VMware and Intel as minority investors.

VCE will now do all product development, integration, pre-sales and support. It will move Acadia’s pre-configured Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, concocted out of Cisco’s Intel-based servers and networking, EMC’s storage and security and VMware virtualization, through the 120 resellers the coalition has reportedly assembled and apparently through the Cisco, EMC and VMware sales machines. It will need to wrestle with the implicit channel conflicts.

Acadia was supposed to build, operate and transfer Vblock infrastructure to customers, half of which were expected to be end users, half service providers.

VCE is reportedly abandoning the reference architectures Acadia started with for turnkey SKUs shipped fully configured from factories in Ireland and Massachusetts at fixed prices – not prices negotiated as you go with each of its three parents separately.

There’s now supposed to be an integrated two-year product roadmap and the ability to upgrade system components as they happen from each of the threesome – not way later – as well as code updates at fixed intervals.

Reseller can apparently expect third-party training programs and market development funds.

For its part, VCE has 500 people and is reportedly hiring. Its people are increasingly its own rather than on loan from its parents and it’s supposed to up the number of Centers of Excellence it has globally to show off the widgetry to tire-kicking prospects.

Netezza, it says, is dependent on proprietary hardware that impacts its I/O and puts it out-of-sync with the latest advances. Oracle, it goes on, with its historical scaling issues, is using relatively skimpy old-fashioned legacy SMP widgetry that’s better at OLTP than data warehousing and analytics, Greenplum’s strength. Exadata, it says, “breaks at more than eight racks” and Teradata, well, Teradata might be considered a rival but its price point is so over the moon it’s not really comparable.

Greenplum, which never did hardware before and always preached the software-only approach, is using standard x86 Intel boxes sourced from Dell with 10 gigE switches that expand to 16 servers in a rack for its new integrated massively parallel Data Computing Appliance.

It developed the thing during its short two-and-a-half months as an EMC property – now that it’s got EMC’s wherewithal to do it – and positions the box as “a key enabler of ‘big data’ clouds and self-service analytics.”

It also positions EMC as a server wannabe like Cisco, which also jumped its hereditary boundaries.

The parallel-everything widget uses Greenplum’s latest and greatest 4.0 Database and is supposed to process 10TB an hour, making it twice as fast as Exadata systems and five times fast as systems from Netezza and Teradata.

Greenplum claims its purpose-built parallel system can handle up to 5PB of “real” user data across a maximum 4,608 cores, offering up to three times more scalability and four times as many database cores than rival systems for the industry’s best price/performance ratio.

Since it’s supposed to deliver the industry’s fastest data loading and performance, more data can be analyzed faster and at lower cost and users should be able to make sense of the massive amounts of data they generate from various sources such as always-on networks, the web, consumers, surveillance systems and sensors more efficiently. It supports both large batch and continuous real-time loading.

Of course IDC predicts that data will grow 44-fold over the next decade.

Greenplum has integrated database, compute, storage and networking into the enterprise-class system and will sell it in half-rack, full-rack and multi-rack appliance configurations that scale to 24 racks. And being an EMC vassal, it’s integrated with EMC’s replication, backup, recovery and deduplication technologies.

EMC’s Data Domain acquisition (famously plucked out of NetApp’s hands) is supplying integrated backup and deduplication while EMC’s own CLARiiON-based CX4 960 machines – in their RecoverPoint disaster recovery avatar – will be offered alongside Greenplum’s appliance for site-to-site replication. That way the company can say no server-based resources are consumed for remote replication and failback operations.

Greenplum’s Postgres-based Database 4.0 is still available as a licensed software-only solution for deployment on industry-standard x86 hardware and integrated infrastructure solutions such as the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition Vblock infrastructure packages.

EMC, which claims the appliance will be a “key element of private clouds,” will supply consulting, migration, services and training for the anti-Oracle/anti-IBM push.

The appliance lists for a million dollars for an entry-level half-rack, which is good for 18TB uncompressed, 72TB compressed.

Greenplum pre-sold a few racks ahead of its announcement Wednesday including the New York Stock Exchange and was reportedly expecting to deliver a six-rack system this week.

Since becoming part of EMC 75 days ago, Greenplum says staffing has increased by 30% to 200 people. Apparently its field organization is increasing.

Presumably they took the name from the ancient Greeks who used the word to mean a refuge or idyllic place and not the uprooted and deported North American Acadia captured in Longfellow’s magnificent tear-jerker “Evangeline,” although Cisco’s new enemies IBM and HP may try to persuade users that it is.

Anyway, Cisco, EMC and VMware – with at least the encouragement of their silent partner Intel – have also formed what they call the Virtual Computing Environment coalition to push on-premise and hosted private cloud computing created out of Cisco’s Intel Xeon-based Unified Computing Systems (UCS) and networking, EMC’s storage and security and VMware’s virtualization to large accounts and service providers through third parties.

The coalition, which will claim more of their resources, talent and investment than the joint venture, will consist of an ecosystem of VARs, service providers, channel partners and ISVs and to start includes the big system integrators Accenture, Capgemini, CSC, Lockheed Martin, Tata Consulting Services and Wipro.

It’s supposed to advance Cisco’s fortunes in the data center against IBM and HP, both of which are ticked at Cisco’s temerity in daring to try to break into servers – and neither is likely to be any happier with this alliance. Their only consolation may be that Cisco’s boxes haven’t gotten a ringing endorsement from users – at least not yet.

What they might like even less, however, is EMC CEO Joe Tucci’s contention that no one company can deliver everything that’s needed in this leg of technology and that he and his mates have a major leg up on the kind of collegiality that will be needed going forward, the kind of partnership that – according to Cisco CEO John Chambers – “will change the data center and the cloud forever.”

The three companies are going to be pooling their roadmaps and sharing and relinquishing control of their most sacred customer information to each other. And Chambers said the “leap of faith” involved in such a situation “begins at the top,” adding “I trust Joe with my life.” Chambers, by the way, once worked for Tucci and their relationship goes back decades.

McKinsey estimates that the market they’re shooting for will be worth $85 billion by 2015, or 20% of worldwide spending on data center infrastructure and services.

Acadia is characterized as an accelerator for users that want to get out of the blocks fast. It and the coalition are going to peddle and support what are called Vblock infrastructure packages – integrated, tested, validated, ready-to-grow configurations of the quartet’s virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security and management technologies.

The companies say that early Vblock customer trials have delivered up to 40% reductions in the cost of operating and managing virtualized data center infrastructures, a major come-on.

The first kits out the door this quarter from third parties include a mid-range Vblock 1 and a high-end Vblock 2. An entry-level Vblock 0 is due next year.

Vblock 2 supports 3,000-6,000 virtual machines and is built out of Cisco’s UCS boxes and Nexus 1000v and Multilayer Directional Switches (MDS); EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max storage and RSA security; and VMware’s vSphere platform.

Vblock 1 supports 800-3,000 virtual machines and uses EMC’s CLARiiON storage.

Vblock 0, when it gets here, will support 300-800 virtual machines and use EMC’s Unified Storage. It will target medium-sized businesses, small data centers or organizations and be used for test and development by channel partners, systems integrators, service providers, ISVs and customers.

Pricing on Vblock, which won’t brook any substitutions of outside hardware or software, is hard to pin down because each account will be different but will range from hundreds of thousands to many millions of dollars.

The companies said the widgetry can scale with additional computer and storage claiming that’s a key differentiator compared to other people’s monolithic systems.

Their calling card will be virtualization because it’s the hinge on which the whole door swings. VMware CEO Paul Maritz says that the triumvirate is also working to ensure that users can get out of the cloud as well as into it. It’s not meant to be, as the song says, the Hotel California from which there is no escape.

EMC has also come up with Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager for Vblock, which is designed to support a wide range of enterprise management consoles. EMC’s RSA security is layered on the Vblock architecture for policy management of identity, data and infrastructure but doesn’t mean the customer has to reduce the security software it already has in place.

The companies mean to bring out other Vblock packages including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Chambers said the companies are working on “seven or eight things,” but identified none of them.

Besides pre-sales, the coalition will hawk a bunch of professional services including a Cloud-based Business Advisory Service, Private Cloud Strategic Impact Advisory Service, Private Cloud Architecture Impact Advisory Service, Virtual Desktop Advisory Service, Cloud Computing Strategy Service, and Vblock Design and Implementation Service.

Acadia, meanwhile, is supposed to build, initially operate and ultimately transfer Vblock infrastructure to the customers, half of which are likely to be end users and half service providers.

The engagements – and they’re only talking about a “modest number” of accounts that want to get up fast – should run from 18 months to three years. The companies see Acadia as something of a knowledge repository, heavy on white papers, and training. There will be problem re-creation labs. It should begin customer operations in Q1. It reportedly has no signed contracts yet.

The infrastructure-as-a-service Acadia venture will have its own CEO but the companies haven’t picked him yet. They’re recruiting. Otherwise Acadia will consist of 130 people described as the trio’s “top talent.”

The companies aren’t explaining how much was or will be invested in the venture or by whom only that EMC and Cisco are the principals.

The coalition’s management is more amorphous. Supposedly the three CEOs are running it; more practically they’ve delegated their senior lieutenants to see it thrives day-to-day, folks like Howard Elias and Pat Gelsinger and in turn Dennis Hoffman at EMC, Gary Moore and Rob Lloyd and in turn Manjula Talreja at Cisco and Brian Byun at VMware. This bears watching to see how it shakes out since there’s no real quarterback.

Where EMC’s Atmos cloud widgetry may or may not fit in the grand scheme of things is unclear.

Based on broad hints from the companies, which were already joined at the hip, the Wall Street Journal got wind of the joint venture in September and said it was code named Alpine. They’ve reportedly been working on it for the last three-and-a-half years, intently the last six months.